A year ago churches in Britain and America were whipping themselves into a frenzy in anticipation of the release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. We were given stories of how it changed people’s lives, how people cried through the whole film, how at the end of it people just stayed in their seats. Strangely I was unmoved.

A year on though, I experienced those feelings with a totally different film. Staggering into the street I had to sit on a bench outside the cinema, stunned by what I had just seen. I tend to shy away from the hyperbole of "everyone should see this film", in fact it really gets my back up, but Hotel Rwanda is a film that I think everyone should see.

Hotel Rwanda tells the real life story of Paul Rusesabagina the manager of a Hotel in Rwanda in the middle of the slaughter of the Tutsi people in 1994. Initally, he is convinced the storm that seems to be coming will just blow over, but the sudden realisation that his Tutsi wife and their children are potential targets for the genocide destroys his comfortable world. When other Tutsi people start turning up at the hotel for shelter he finds himself unable to refuse, even though it runs against his deepest inclinations. In fact, the film is very similar to the approach taken by Schindler’s List. Rather than focus on the victims who die, it focuses on a man who saves a great number of them - a great number that is, until it is compared with the total number who died in those conflicts (almost a million people in Rwanda).

Whilst Hotel Rwanda is not as artistic as Schindler’s List, (far and away Steven Spielberg’s greatest film), it is much more powerful. The Holocaust is 60 years ago. Rwanda is just 10. I was an adult with political power who did nothing as over eight hundred thousand people lost their lives. Yesterday I could not have told you who died, how many died and why they died. I didn’t even know what a Tutsi was and what a Hutu was. As predicted by one of the western journalists in the film in 1994 I said 'my god that’s terrible' and carried on eating my dinner.

Part of the reason that Hotel Rwanda is so powerful is because of Don Cheadle’s performance as Paul. Whereas Neeson, as Schindler, remains relatively stoic until the end of the film, Paul is much more passionate. Desperation is frequently written across his face, and yet he is still able to break into laughter when he finds his wife hiding from the rebels in the bath armed only with a showerhead. The most powerful scene follws the most disturbing as Paul trying to get on with the normalities of his life falls to pieces as he fails to knot his tie. Perhaps what is most appealing about the character is the way he is gradually drawn into being good. At the start of the film he is almost a selfish man, intent on looking after his family, but not their friends. He prides himself on the quality of his hotel and keeping it looking professional and attractive to the tourists who stay there. Initially he is actually dismayed as the quality of service plummets to accommodate the refugees who keep arriving. But the slide into goodness, and true heroism goes on and on.

Ultimately the Tutsis fought back and drove the Hutu militants from Rwanda into what is now the Congo. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t really show this, other than brief skirmish at the front line, leaving things a little one sided. Nevertheless, that is the most minor of quibbles. Hotel Rwanda is both a powerful indictment of the supposedly developed world’s failure to act, and a demonstration of the difference that we can make if we choose to.